Electronic discovery is a process by which a party produces certain documents required by law or rules in response to a document request or court subpoena. Electronic discovery is frequently used in legal proceedings such as corporate litigation, corporate merger approval, and administrative investigation.
In a typical legal proceeding, a party may, pursuant to rule of procedure, send a document request or a subpoena duces tecum to another party to compel it to produce documents containing any of specified categories of subject matters. Historically, paper documents were produced manually. The responding party reviews its documents, identifies all documents containing any of the enumerated categories of subject matters, and produces them for the requesting party. However, information technology has caused companies and businesses to produce extremely large document pools, and thus reviewing and producing documents by the manual method are no longer practicable. Therefore, a party responsive to a document request has to use a document review platform for document review. Each platform consists of a server and server application and plural terminal computers connected to the server. Many well-known review platforms can be found on Google. Regardless of the platform used for an discovery project, the basic concept is the same. The documents from one or more custodians of the responsive party are collected and stored on a server. If original documents are in the form of hardcopy, they are first scanned and saved as suitable image files which are then loaded onto the server. Certain electronic documents are converted into image file formats such as Tiff, PDF, and PNG. Other electronic documents may be converted into text files by optical character recognizing technique while their native copies are also available for download. Most of the well-known review platforms deliver electronic documents to review terminals in text, TIFF, PDF, or native files and the reviewer at a terminal can choose any of them.
When a document pool contains millions of documents created by large organization of thousands of employees, they contain a large number of people in email and documents. It is often critical for the reviewer or investigator understand the role of the sender and recipients. It is indeed very difficult to keep track of their identities. Moreover, any companies have routinely exchanges email and other communications with other organizations and persons, it is even harder for a reviewer and investigator to keep track of their identities.